Geoffrey Wood Quotes

Remember, this type doesn’t really believe He’ll forgive them, by repenting they are trying to earn what they do not think, in any case, He will pay.
Geoffrey Wood
Truth, with a capital T, was swapped for Fact with a capital F, then both lower-cased —facts the new trues.
Geoffrey Wood
When everything all in a moment comes together, surprisingly perfect, it doesn’t prove there’s a loving God; but if there is, isn’t it perfect when all in a moment, God proves how surprisingly He loves?
Geoffrey Wood
They forget that for a Creator to create, He must be greater than His creation, thus He must be by definition not less than emotional.
Geoffrey Wood
The Americans’ great wealth (and their great love for it) makes it precisely the appropriate metaphor. Supply and Demand as a principle has permeated their minds. As a practice, it stains all the way down to their souls.
Geoffrey Wood
In every human act of charity, something larger, greater, divine has come down to visit the act.
Geoffrey Wood
Selling a new lie is easy, but not so with un-teaching an old truth.
Geoffrey Wood
Teach them the shame that tells the lie, “I am unforgivable,” when the truth is, “I feel unforgivable, but it was out of my control.” Never let them switch those round right or The Adversary will liberate them in a heartbeat, like a bird flying from a cage.
Geoffrey Wood
They think virtues are man-made, only exist because they exist, but if no human had ever existed, The Virtues would persist for they hold their being from the very Presence of the Adversary Himself.
Geoffrey Wood
We’ve spent centuries moving them away from that word virtue and especially The Virtues and that’s precisely how we did it —by making it lower case.
Geoffrey Wood
Denial makes it easier to keep an addiction progressing smoothly along and, being a lie, it’s just better form.
Geoffrey Wood
With addiction, a client’s fears can be ripened into some very pleasing fruit: Irritability, suspiciousness, isolation, paranoia, and finally on to that grand banana —the fear of Fear itself.
Geoffrey Wood
The trick here is, while the actual pleasure begins to recede and blur, we simultaneously bring the imagined pleasure more fully into focus. And when we do, even the memory of the pleasure becomes more and more heightened and imagined, thus anticipation is increased. This kind of anticipation is the spiritual equivalent of a Cheeto and we want them to eat the whole bag.
Geoffrey Wood
If we must tempt to Pleasure, how do we tempt to the least amount of Pleasure? Or better yet, tempt them to its opposite? But how to tempt them to pain.
Geoffrey Wood
An imagined pleasure is never really the pleasure, but an imagined pain, in a very real sense, is the pain, because so much of pain is the consciousness of it. It makes itself objective. Whereas to think about pleasure is to step outside of it; to think about a presently felt pain is to step inside it. And in a very real sense, we’ve already got them in Hell.
Geoffrey Wood
And so, wish becomes pang; the crave, an ache; pleasure, pain. Losing all its pleasure, anticipation cuts the opposite direction and becomes merely a constant, painful reminder of what they’ve lost, forever.
Geoffrey Wood
As a motivation —for humans, but Christians especially— guilt is always wrong and can never move them to do anything He wants of them. Never let them realize that.
Geoffrey Wood
If we can keep the Christians thinking of themselves as sinners not sons and daughters, we can make them view their relationship to The Adversary as a negative-sum-game: They fall in a hole, He pulls them out, they fall back in, etc... That way they never get anywhere; they’re always either standing next to a hole or down in it.
Geoffrey Wood
Guilt, if cultivated in a Christian client, can render their Christianity worthless to themselves and others.
Geoffrey Wood
Even if their guilt actually does produce a good action, it will be the saddest good action you’ll ever see, and it will be of no use to them because their goal is not to obey, but to feel less guilty, thus nothing about their souls will be reshaped.
Geoffrey Wood
Their guilt plus their repentance should have equalled forgiveness. But they don’t feel forgiven, so they failed, which makes them feel guilty, which was why they repented in the first place, so they’re stuck right where they started: Guilty.
Geoffrey Wood
You see my point? The average person has a very average notion of goodness to which they aspire averagely. To aspire to goodness in any remarkable way would be ‘undemocratic’.
Geoffrey Wood
For example, your man might think: I don’t steal. Maybe on my taxes, everyone does that, but not in the way I heard so and so stole from his company. See? Those men for whose opinion he cares approve of embezzlement in one area, not the other. He uses them to maintain a claim on goodness while at the same time stealing.
Geoffrey Wood
If they ever envision Goodness as a thing that exists outside them, some real thing they’ve been called to participate in by their actions, well then, we’re headed right back toward The Virtues.
Geoffrey Wood
Indeed if they ever once saw the endless supply of eternal opportunities The Adversary offers them every temporal moment of day after day of their fuddled little lives, they would stagger at the sheer industry and prodigality of His efforts. Conversely, if they ever gained a glimpse of how their ordinary actions actually effect and shape things not only under time but without, the very vast weight of that would almost certainly end in their becoming humble.
Geoffrey Wood
If God gives you a hundred bucks, you better bet He’s going to ask you what you bought.
Geoffrey Wood
This is why we apply the LCD Principle or Lowest Common Democracy. In short, this is social interaction based not on the best possible good, but on the least possible offense. Without saying so, the parties involved have entered into the following arrangement: What is the least we can all agree on and still get along? Of course, you can see this means no one is pleased.
Geoffrey Wood
Courtesy, not control, that was His means. Just as He requested the stars to sing and they leapt into bright being, so request was to be their rule over bird and beast, seas and trees, mountains and moons and all the dancing distances between the heavenlies filled with the unending song of Creation.
Geoffrey Wood
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happy hour, the long weekend, the all-inclusive island resort, the sunny beach vacation. Happiness is somewhere else, someplace with boat drinks, some secret, distant state of bliss which if they were given would bore them in minutes.
Geoffrey Wood
Where faith costs nothing, faith loses respect, even to those who possess it.
Geoffrey Wood
As a rule, Americans are big on that word “choice” and some souls can be captured simply by dangling before the creature a continual, lifelong supply of things from which to choose.
Geoffrey Wood
Finally, slowly, drippingly, degrade the term Choice down to its most meager means: The red car not the black one. The 9:25 showing, not the 7:15. Ritz not Wheat Thins.
Geoffrey Wood
I say “illusion” of choice because, in many cases, the nature of their choices hardly reaches the level of will, but of merely perfunctory activity. For the most part, their desires are not too strong, they are too weak, apathetic and easily placated. They often can be tempted into doing Nothing.
Geoffrey Wood
They all want to be happy. They all think they should be happy. And they’re quick to trot out their most cherished document and point to where they were promised “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” But you’ll find that though they all parrot that little phrase, they think none too hard about that word “pursuit”. To follow, to chase, to inquire, to hunt, to seek. To track in order to overtake and capture. This they don’t do. Instead, having been offered a promise of happiness, they progress to a feeling of entitlement for happiness, then make the leap that happiness should, therefore, be easily won, automatic. There’s too much wrong in there to even scratch at that!
Geoffrey Wood
Life, liberty and the pursuit of gratitude, now that would’ve worked. They would have been readily led to contentment, which would’ve then better lead them on to happiness.
Geoffrey Wood
It seems The Adversary needs neither their guilt nor their request, but simply their return. In other words, since repentance is the process whereby guilt is turned into gratitude, He doesn’t mind if they skip a step and go directly to gratitude.
Geoffrey Wood
That sense of entitlement is precisely where we want them because the right to happiness is directly opposed to one of The Adversary’s greatest curatives —gratitude.
Geoffrey Wood
Gratitude, not guilt, as motivation is always His starting point, thus guilt as a motivation leads nowhere.
Geoffrey Wood
Never let them try out this gratitude, for they would immediately discover that it supplies the first and most important component to happiness: Contentment.
Geoffrey Wood
I shouldn’t need to remind you that it was words that created the universe and The Word that now holds it together. While your man was simply reading one little book, something not unlike Genesis was stirring in his skull, and you didn’t think to stop it?
Geoffrey Wood
I don’t even like the phrase ‘opportunity to sin’ because it implies the opportunity to obey.
Geoffrey Wood
Also, always encourage 'being good' over 'doing good.' Acts of goodness are the difficulty for us and should, of course, be avoided. 'Being good' is far less problematic, largely because it lacks definition and can be solely a state of mind completely unattached to reality.
Geoffrey Wood
Still, despite all our noise, this universe hinges on a melody, that’s the dismal truth of it. Oh, we can propagandize all we wish, it doesn’t change the fabric of things. This universe was not made for the fallen, only the redeemed.
Geoffrey Wood
Everyone needs to calm down! Okay, you got a weird cookie. So what? I don’t mean to swat your ego here, buddy, but this smacks a little narcissistic for me. God is not trying to communicate to you through a cookie. It doesn’t work that way. God’s not all Jack-and-the-magic-beans and tooth-beneath-the pillow voodoo. You don’t just close your eyes, flap open your Bible, and slam a steak knife into a verse. It’s that sort of thinking that leads to witch trials and Senate probes.
Geoffrey Wood
The Bible is the one book we’ve most succeeded in having them never read as a book. Keep it that way.
Geoffrey Wood
With Truth, Reason, and Morality off the board, we then capture their last Rook —that prissy little virtue, Temperance— for she depends on those other three for her beauty and was thus left wholly undefended.
Geoffrey Wood
Though I despise it, I do not doubt His Love for the creatures. I have seen it —His ever-reaching outward for any hand that might reach back. At His love, I tremble yet believe.
Geoffrey Wood
Turning an experience about to observe it, results in a lessening of the experience directly proportional to the amount of observation. To think about it is, to some degree, to stop the pleasure, to stop the experience, to step outside it.
Geoffrey Wood
Grace runs downhill and now all his time is being redeemed.
Geoffrey Wood
If we blind them to The Adversary —decrease their desire for The Desire— while at the same time encourage them to do anything else they desire with increasing “freedom of choice,” then eventually we snuff out desire while leaving demand in tact.
Geoffrey Wood
They think that if they were allowed to do anything they desired, they would be satisfied and the more desires the better. But all desires divorced from The Desire eventually collapse in on themselves.
Geoffrey Wood
If God’s suggesting that I am expected to do good and also obligated to manufacture a genuine desire for it, this boat’s sunk, still sitting on the trailer in the driveway. A stack of things need to happen before I desire to be good…
Geoffrey Wood
You don’t change the world by telling it what to do, sitting at home, and telling it what you believe. You believe by throwing yourself into it. Making a leap, getting involved, then waiting, taking some one person’s place for a while, one suffering person at a time.
Geoffrey Wood
Your suffering only matters if it connects you to the suffering of others, if it heals them too.
Geoffrey Wood
And keep them thinking in terms of 'being good' as this is not an end so much as a means to something else —happiness, respect, self-esteem, etc… And whatever their true end is, take it away, and so goes their goodness.
Geoffrey Wood
Indeed, if their wristbands asked them the question: “What-Would-Jesus-Buy”—well now, that could very well revolutionize the Christian church in America.
Geoffrey Wood
It was like magic, but so much of magic is about misdirection, whereas so much of redemption is straightforward and ordinary, piercing true and lit with surprise.
Geoffrey Wood
Press them continually with memory and dream and have them waste their Present there.
Geoffrey Wood
And once their imaginations are liberated, they begin glimpse the grand interconnectedness of all things. Eternity begins to peek out from behind the everyday things and they see the trappings of any earthly moment as the stage and props for Heaven to reveal itself. There is now nothing ordinary. Everything is being used and spun out for His vast scheme and in His eternal economy, nothing is wasted. Suddenly, all the myriad moments and minutiae of a lifetime show their orchestration —there was nothing that did not lead to this! They look over all their time to find that His redemption has always been rushing, swooping, swerving through their experience, racing to and fro to intervene and infuse Grace.
Geoffrey Wood
When their minds mingle with His magnanimity, something of eternity rubs off on their imaginations.
Geoffrey Wood